


Stronger, Faster

by Umbralpilot



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: (As we all knew), Cybernetics, Gen, Genji's parts are detachable that probably needs a warning, No robots were harmed, Overwatch has Secrets, Pre-Fall of Overwatch, Transhumanism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-10
Updated: 2017-09-20
Packaged: 2018-12-26 01:45:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12048738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Umbralpilot/pseuds/Umbralpilot
Summary: Genji didn't choose to be made other than human. But there is more to his new body than he first thought... and perhaps more to how it came to be.





	1. Chapter 1

They weren’t really a family. It was a nice sentiment, and they bandied it about during the good times, when all the pieces combined seemed to make something more in the whole. But throw together any collection of oddities and there would be that want, to with the rest of those who never have, and all of them were sharp enough to know it. It made encounters shoot sparks sometimes when exposed wires were forced to brush too close in the hope of completing a circuit. They wanted, but they weren’t really family, because there wasn’t really intimacy about it when they were all busy trying to turn their oddities into heroism before the whole world.

It took, let’s face it, a particular kind of intimacy to have someone walk in on you when your face was off. Genji did not have that intimacy with Fareeha Amari, age fifteen.

Technically speaking, Genji’s lower jaw wasn’t even supposed to come off outside of upgrades or heavy maintenance. He must have been exceptionally drunk to do it, and in possession of tools one should not possess while exceptionally drunk. Or perhaps it was McCree who had actually done the detaching, because he was certain it had been McCree’s idea to test whether Genji could remote-taste things through his artificial palate when it wasn’t all in one piece. Genji couldn’t strictly taste anything to begin with - he had certain chemical sniffers, but the signals they fired translated to  _salt present_ , not  _salty._ But he had been exceptionally drunk and figured the worst thing that could happen was accidentally poisoning himself, which was of course a weak deterrent. So now his chemical sniffers were pitching little fits at the quantity of ethanol soaked into their bedding in his tongue, and he was too damn hungover to lock the screws in his jaw hinge right, and a teenage girl in a set of slacks nicked from his commanding officer was staring at him from his doorway, looking like she was going to need her own jaw screwed properly on again.

“Didn’t your mother teach you to knock?” Genji snapped, feeling everything in his skull rattle a little out of alignment.

Fareeha went as hot a red as her brown complexion showed and seemed to shrink just a bit further into Commander Reyes’ black hoodie. She was at that gangly stage where everything her body did was amplified by its unwieldiness, and – Genji remembered fifteen – when she probably thought it was ten times as obvious as it already was,

“I, um, I was knocking and the door wasn’t, it just opened.”

“I always lock the door.”

“Well you, didn’t last night. Maybe because you and Jesse, um, he said I should check you’re okay - “

“Tell him to fuck off.” Genji’s English was still heavily accented, and worse when he didn’t have full control of his mouth, but he had learned to enunciate some specific words.

Fareeha twitched. A gesture wrung between the shrinking cringe that came from being fifteen, and the jerking up of her chin that came from being Fareeha Amari. Genji didn’t wait to see which would win out. He whipped to his feet and walked up to the door, hand already held out to slam it shut.

He caught sight of an o-shape to the mouth, the lightest lean forward on the girl’s toes, the muted silver flash of him reflected in flaring pupils. With inches from his hand to the door, Fareeha mumbled, “ _Ya Allah,_ that is  _really_  cool.”

Genji froze. Not because he was surprised, either by her words or by her not backing off – she looked like she had forgotten to – but because he realized she wasn’t even looking at his face. His torso. His body. His armour was entirely off. Fareeha had never seen him that dismantled before. The metal that clasped defensively round his throat, the intricate circuitry woven along his ribs, down to the lining of the cartridges in his prosthetic arm, the glowing readouts self-monitoring on the synthetic mesh of his stomach –

He straightened. Her eyes followed the shift. He thrust out his chest, the plate over his heart and the tubes that plunged in and out of him. Fareeha’s look was roving and hungry. Her lips formed the word _cool_ again, then switched to making it in Arabic.

Genji tried to deadpan. He used to be good at it. “If it’s ‘so cool’,” but actually he was snarling, with venom he couldn’t give people he was supposed to be fighting alongside, “why don’t you try it?”

Fareeha perked right up. “I’m going to.”

They weren’t really a family, and so Genji only knew from rumours, from McCree’s gabbing, that Fareeha wasn’t the most interpersonally astute girl around. McCree’s common description - fond, but as patronizing as only one kid could be to another - was “a huge dweeb”. Genji’s stomach heaved, and he told himself it was the hangover. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t normal. This kid, a strange shoot grown in strange soil, in Overwatch. Thinking that strangeness was heroic.

She was fifteen. He was a cybernetically enhanced assassin. He couldn’t slap her.

“I mean, it’s strictly medical technology,” Fareeha continued,  _a huge dweeb_ , not picking up on his shocked seething rage. Or possibly the chin-jerk from before had won out after all. “Angela said so. But maybe by the time I enlist some of the stuff would be available as an elective upgrade. Like  _ummi_ ’s eye? You know she volunteered to test it out when she - “

“I didn’t volunteer,” Genji said, so tightly he thought the screws in his jaw might lock themselves.

“I know. Just - “ she fumbled, he stayed silent, and finally, finally, a thunderstruck look descended upon Fareeha’s face and weighted her shoulders. She looked a little grey. Green. Greyish-green. “I - that was really stupid, _really_ stupid, I’m sorry, even for an idiot like me that was really, it’s just that this is so - “ 

She raised a hand, young and ill-fitting and half-finished, in a vague longing gesture at the chrome and steel of him.  

Genji took a steadying breath. He’d been finding those hard ever since vents and pumps had become involved. Being able to see the internal state of his body displayed in digital red at any given second on what passed for his skin was also no help. He wanted to tell her to get out of there. He wanted to tell her that this wasn’t what he dreamed about getting when he was growing up into himself. He half-turned and gritted out, “your mother will not approve.”

It was a fatal mistake. Even without looking, he could  _feel_  Fareeha’s presence expand, feel her self strain at the seams of her awkward youth. “Mother won’t approve of anything I want to do.”

“And you should listen! This is not a game, it is not ‘cool’! This is my body!” Despite himself he threw those words at her feet, at her face, his living hand flashing down the cold dead length of him,  _look, you wanted to look!_ “No one wants this!”

Fareeha failed to step back, mortified and pinned in place by it. He felt the memory of bile at the back of his throat - no real bile anymore - at the look he always read as pity. She was fifteen, she wasn’t a child. He could reach out and grab the back of her oversized hoodie and shake her inside it and force her to –

He hadn’t realized how fast he moved until realizing that she had tried to counter him, that the tears in her eyes were just a reflex response to the collision of her bare wrist against the metal of his arm. She might have succeeded, if he had been only a man. Through all her disapproval her mother had trained her well. It occurred to him then that Ana would not truly stop her daughter from anything, not even this, if Fareeha truly wanted it. The ones who loved her would back her to the end. A stress alarm materialized at the edge of his amplified vision, crisp and red, and he knew his systems followed with the hum of configuring him into battle mode, preparing endorphins, stimulants, coolant, everything he needed to be rendered calm, detached and precise.

“I’m sorry!” Fareeha burst, even as she planted her feet down into a defensive combat pose. “I’m sorry this happened to you. I always say the wrong thing – damnit why do I always – I know you hate it, I just, I  _do_ want this. For  _my_  body. I want to be the strongest, fastest – “

“You want to be a weapon?!”

“I’m going to be a soldier!”

Genji let her go. She didn’t even slump, just settled, brittle but instantly braced with her fists up, as straight-backed as her growing bones could make her. 

“You’re a child,” Genji said, with more tiredness than disgust.  _I was also a child. They didn’t care._ “You don’t know what you want.”

A fatal mistake. Again. When he looked back at her she looked him in the eye. “This is my body,” she said again. “It’s about doing what  _I_  want. I - Angela thought you’d understand.”

Genji closed his eyes. “Angela didn’t ask what I wanted.”

“She said you were going to die,” Fareeha answered, “and that dead people can’t make choices.”

It was the most Angela thing Genji had heard in over a year of knowing Angela; and at the same time it was all of Overwatch, Ana with her scouring wisdom, Morrison with his do-your-damn-job grit, Reyes with his unrelenting faith in change, in possibility. All of it rolled up into this girl that grew up in this collection of oddities that wasn’t really a family. Genji’s heart spasmed through the battle prep. He tightened his jaw.

His jaw made a creaking noise, and a screw popped out of the hinge.

Fareeha made a strangled noise that was quite possibly a word Ana wasn’t supposed to know she knew. 

The screw tinkled on the floor. The alarms in his vision paused, apparently uncertain. Genji considered his options. He could initiate system shutdown and attempt to die on the spot. He could fly into a rage that would definitely end with him having to explain the set of circumstances to Reyes, if not, worse, to Ana. Or he could…

He probably couldn’t do it on his own.

Fuck.

Fareeha, he realized, had instinctively bent down to pick up the fallen screw. She was only halfway looking at him from under knotting eyebrows. He had to reach out and realign his jaw, and keep a hand up to keep it realigned as he spoke. “You fucked it up, so you come help me fix it properly.”

Her eyes lit up. Maybe it was his third fatal mistake of the day. Maybe instead of showing her the horror of it - of having to have a part of you  _fixed_ , worked on with pliers and a screwdriver - he was encouraging her, whatever her fantasies were, of being gleaming, impervious, easy to repair. But his head hurt too badly to care anymore: he just wanted to be in one piece again. Let Ana work it out of her system, or age. Age would do it. No one really wanted to grow up to all changed, all remade.

He let the door drift open, and Fareeha followed him gingerly into the room. She pulled out a stool next to the bed as he dropped onto it and groaned at Athena to dim the lights. Her lips pursed.

“Angela told me you can switch off hangovers if you want,” she said, almost like it was a dare.

Genji shook his head, though it made his vision swim. “They make me feel human.”

Fareeha looked back down at her hand. She was holding the screw between a thumb and forefinger, rolling it carefully, testing its shape and feel. Her eyes passed between it and him. “I guess I understand,” she said, in a tone that said she didn’t really, but would try to for his sake. Maybe it was fine for now, Genji thought. Maybe it was the first step.

 _That is_ really _cool_

“Come on.” He turned his head to let her see where he needed her. “Let’s see if you can handle it.”

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gabriel Reyes contributes his views on enhancement. They are not what Genji wanted to hear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So uh, this is now a multi-partner. With plot. idk idk.

“What did you say to Fareeha?” Reyes asked as Genji’s shuriken clipped a thread off the rim of his beanie.

Genji would’ve stopped in his track if he could do it mid backflip. “What did _I_ say to _Fareeha?”_

“Heard me the first time.” Like he always did when someone made him repeat himself mid-sparring, Reyes exploded into Genji’s space and swiped his feet out from under him. He brought him down with a blow from the butt of his shotgun that almost made Genji’s newly refitted jaw snap out of its hinge again.

Reyes was the only person in Overwatch that Genji could really spar at close range with. Even Morrison was too slow, for all his SEP augmentation – because he wouldn’t use his augmentation, Reyes would say, not the right way, not in a way that made him truly more than human. Genji had never really thought about it too much, not after hearing from Angela what had been done in the SEP and finding it ridiculously incomparable to what happened to him. But he had noticed, all of Overwatch had noticed that something about Gabriel Reyes was… different. Different to everything.

And he hated having to say anything twice. Genji had barely twisted out of the way of a follow-up kick when his commander spun into another and caught him on the shoulder mid rolling up to a lunge. A fumble, gyros furious, he lashed out last-minute and his foot slipped past Reyes’s ankle. Not fast enough. Reyes stepped on his foot, armour and all, ground down with a steel-studded heel. Genji choked with red alarms. Flung an arm up and Reyes caught it, tore it aside, put his shotgun right to Genji’s visor and shoved.

“Bang,” he said, and stepped back at once, all business.

Genji breathed. Beaten again. Reyes always beat him. Reyes beat everyone.

He did also linger back while Genji caught his breath, and only offered him a hand up when it wouldn’t smart too badly on his battered pride. Genji took it without resentment. He’d tried to score a hit in that moment at his first session, when he thought Reyes’s guard would surely be down; he’d learned _that_ lesson. Now he was just grateful for his commander’s absolute matter of fact look as he surveyed Genji for any actual damage.

“Good job on that foot jab, would’ve gotten anyone else,” Reyes said as they went to the benches for a drink. He tossed Genji his hydration pack and didn’t look away as Genji hooked it up, just picked up the first of his own bottles. “But you haven’t answered my question.”

Genji scowled under his visor. “Fareeha wants to be cybernetically enhanced.”

“Right. So?”

“You knew?”

“Course I did.” Reyes finished the bottle and started on his second. “Though I wouldn’t have sent her to talk to _you_ about it.”

_Then who, the hell?_ Genji clenched his fists, joints scraping together. “Captain Amari should discipline her.”

“Ana doesn’t know.” At the astounded snap of Genji’s look to him, Reyes raised the half-empty third bottle in warning, one finger held out muzzle-like. “And you’re not going to tell her.”

“Sir, you can’t encourage this!”

“Shimada, you take a good look lately at who Amari Junior is growing up around?” With two flicks, Reyes replaced the bottle in his hand with one of his Hellfires. Without looking away from Genji, he began splashing the heads of the targets across the gym with the paintball duds, every crudely rendered face replaced with red blank out from between the eyes. “You.” _Bang_. “Me. Morrison.” _Bang._ “Lindholm. Wilhelm. Zeigler.” _Bang. Bang. Bang._ “A goddamn moon gorilla with a PhD.” The head of the last target made a crunching wet sound. “Are you really gonna tell her not to try to catch up?”

Genji had lashed out at his commanding officer in anger before. Reyes had caught his swing, twisted his arm backwards until his shuriken launchers popped out of usefulness, and held him in a headlock until his rage subsided. And so, Genji knew that he could do it again.

He snarled as he struggled in the taller man’s crushing grip, eyes blazing at the bottle Reyes held threateningly over his face. “She wants to throw away her humanity!”

Reyes laughed. “Barking up the wrong tree with that one, son.”

“How can you say that?! You fought in the Crisis!”

“And how the hell do you think I won?”

“Not like – “ the surge of disgust that rushed through Genji, even muted by the lack of an organic stomach to turn, was strong enough to overcome his anger. “You volunteered!”

Reyes paused with the bottle in hand, and sighed. His grip slackened. Genji tore away from him instantly, whirling with machine speed. The hand he put up to make sure his jaw was fixed right was shaking a little. He focused on stilling it and wouldn’t look at the commander.

A last swig of the last bottle, and Reyes picked up his second shotgun, and flicked it in Genji’s direction to beckon him close. “C’mere.”

Bowstring-taut, Genji came closer. Closer. Close enough for Reyes to take hold of his fully prosthetic arm and raise it, stretch it out alongside a raised arm of his own. Gun and palm at the same level. “At my command. Fire.”

He didn’t have to think. He threw the shuriken before the last hiss of the syllable left Reyes’s mouth. The analytics in his sight let him know his hand-thrown steel had hit the training dummy a fraction before Reyes’s powder-propelled lead.

“Faster than a speeding bullet,” Reyes said. He pivoted, and raised both Hellfires. “You ever think how fast you are, Genji?”

He fired. Genji wasn’t there. He had no idea what instinct moved him, but he was already halfway across the room, running-leaping in a wide arc to keep one eye out on his opponent. Red stained the wall where he passed, the floor where he jumped, the ledge where he launched himself off and came at Reyes with a splash of shurikens. Reyes shot them from the air, one two three. The last knifed into the muzzle and burst in a shower of hot silver. Reyes dropped it. Brought a hand up back to stab at Genji’s neck. Caught a tubed wire from his shoulder. Genji saw red. Not alarms. Red fear, the tube starting to dislodge.

“You ever think how strong you are?” Reyes asked, impassive.

Genji gasped. Braced. Kicked. Flung Reyes twenty feet back. The tube came loose. Steam and diagnostics screamed.

He wavered, weak on his feet, his right side paralyzed. Across from him Reyes swayed. There was blood at his mouth. They looked at each other. _Fall_ , Genji thought, not knowing who he thought it at. _Fall, damn it_ , _just…_

He fell. Graceless, heavy to one knee. As soon as his hand was flat against the ground, Reyes was steadily walking forward. Instead of a hand up, he offered out the torn tubing.

“Faster than me,” he ground out. “Stronger than me. But you need to _be_ that. Don’t follow Morrison’s example. _Be_ what you are. Make no goddamn mistake.” He coughed, and spit out a gush of dark blood. “I didn’t beat the omnics by being human.”

Genji’s head was still spinning. He nodded, though hardly sure what for.

“Great. Now get to Zeigler, and when she yells at you tell her it’s my fault.” The bloody face before him twisted into a grin. “Don’t give up on it so quick, boy. True that this wasn’t your choice, but dead people can’t make choices.”

It wasn’t until later, patched up and brooding over the conversation, that Genji remembered these words. It wasn’t until later that he began to wonder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up: Not-quite-man vs. not-quite-machine.

**Author's Note:**

> Next up: Advice from Overwatch's other not-quite-human.


End file.
